Month: March 2015

By Mike Foden and Caitlin Halferty Once upon a time, data knew its place. It sat locked in big data warehouses, all nicely structured, and you could only get to it on a need-to-know basis. Life was simple: most of us didn’t need to know. Then the world got social and data exploded—it was everywhere.Read more

In conjunction with the recent #IBMandTwitter analytics announcement, we made a gallery of stats around social business analytics. The Twitter data has already revealed interesting insights, from emerging fashion trends to what determines customer loyalty. Are YOU listening to social chatter?Read more

At the recent 2015 IDC Directions conference in Boston, I heard Scott Lundstrom speak on business transformation and industry clouds. What was particularly compelling about his examples was the extent of the transformation and the first-mover advantage generated by deploying an industry platform via the cloud. In fact, IDC predicts that these types of industry platforms will disrupt one-third of the top 20 market leaders in most industries by 2018.Read more

Frequently, when we hear about how companies are using analytics, we hear about the rainmakers who found a “gold nugget” about customer behavior buried deep in the data and how they’ve used that insight to transform their sales and marketing.Read more

A few years ago, Dr. DJ Patil, who was recently named the first U.S.Chief Data Scientist, co-wrote a Harvard Business Review article introducing the data scientist as “the sexiest job of the 21st century.” “If ‘sexy’ means having rare qualities that are much in demand,” Patil, a veteran of such hot tech companies as Salesforce, eBay, Skype, PayPal and LinkedIn, and his colleague Thomas Davenport wrote, “data scientists are already there.” In Washington today, the same can be said aboutRead more